Most active commenters
  • fuzztester(4)

←back to thread

The man who killed Google Search?

(www.wheresyoured.at)
1884 points elorant | 23 comments | 23 Apr 24 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 1.333s | source | bottom
Show context
gregw134 ◴[23 Apr 24 20:15 UTC] No.40136741[source]▶
Ex-Google search engineer here (2019-2023). I know a lot of the veteran engineers were upset when Ben Gomes got shunted off. Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays debuggable and understandable by human search engineers. My impression is that since he left complexity exploded, with every team launching as many deep learning projects as they can (just like every other large tech company has).

The problem though, is the older systems had obvious problems, while the newer systems have hidden bugs and conceptual issues which often don't show up in the metrics, and which compound over time as more complexity is layered on. For example: I found an off by 1 error deep in a formula from an old launch that has been reordering top results for 15% of queries since 2015. I handed it off when I left but have no idea whether anyone actually fixed it or not.

I wrote up all of the search bugs I was aware of in an internal document called "second page navboost", so if anyone working on search at Google reads this and needs a launch go check it out.

replies(11): >>40136833 #>>40136879 #>>40137570 #>>40137898 #>>40137957 #>>40138051 #>>40140388 #>>40140614 #>>40141596 #>>40146159 #>>40166064 #
JohnFen ◴[23 Apr 24 20:24 UTC] No.40136833[source]▶
> where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning

This better echoes my personal experience with the decline of Google search than TFA: it seems to be connected to the increasing use of ML in that the more of it Google put in, the worse the results I got were.

replies(3): >>40137620 #>>40137737 #>>40137885 #
fuzztester ◴[23 Apr 24 21:48 UTC] No.40137737[source]▶
Same here with YouTube, assuming they use ML, which is likely.

They routinely give me brain-dead suggestions such as to watch a video I just watched today or yesterday, among other absurdities.

replies(5): >>40138204 #>>40138215 #>>40138255 #>>40139304 #>>40139333 #
1. 998244353 ◴[23 Apr 24 22:43 UTC] No.40138204[source]▶
For what it's worth, I do not remember a time when YouTube's suggestions or search results were good. Absurdities like that happened 10 and 15 years ago as well.

These days my biggest gripe is that they put unrelated ragebait or clickbait videos in search results that I very clearly did not search for - often about American politics.

replies(5): >>40138761 #>>40139567 #>>40139761 #>>40141227 #>>40143825 #
2. peoplenotbots ◴[23 Apr 24 23:51 UTC] No.40138761[source]▶
Long long time ago; youtube "staff" would manually put certain videos on the top of the front page when they started. Im sure there we're biases and prioritization of marketing dollars but at least there was human recommending it compared to poorly recorded early family guy clips. I dont know when they stopped manually adding "editors/staff" choice videos but I recall some of my favorite early youtubers like CGPGgrey claim that recommendation built the career.
replies(1): >>40139212 #
3. superluserdo ◴[24 Apr 24 00:55 UTC] No.40139212[source]▶
See this >15-year-old video "How to get featured on YouTube" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uzXeP4g_qA, which I remember as being originally uploaded to the official Youtube channel but looks like it's been removed now, this reupload is from October 2008.
4. FullstakBlogger ◴[24 Apr 24 01:54 UTC] No.40139567[source]▶
15 years ago, I used to keep many tabs of youtube videos open just because the "related" section was full of interesting videos. Then each of those videos had interesting relations. There was so much to explore before hitting a dead-end and starting somewhere else.

Now the "related" section is gone in favor of "recommended" samey clickbait garbage. The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand. The old Markov-chain style works with the human, and lets them recognize what kind of space they've gotten themselves into, and make intelligent decisions, which ultimately benefit the system.

If you judge the system by the presence of negative outliers, rather than positive, then I can understand seeing no difference.

replies(2): >>40140561 #>>40141829 #
5. Narishma ◴[24 Apr 24 02:21 UTC] No.40139761[source]▶
I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display.

Or when they would show more than 3 results before spamming irrelevant videos.

Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video.

Or when they had a dislike button so you would know to avoid wasting time on low quality videos.

replies(2): >>40140281 #>>40141257 #
6. WWLink ◴[24 Apr 24 03:40 UTC] No.40140281[source]▶
> I do remember when Youtube would show more than 2 search results per page on my 23" display.

Wait what?! You "Consume Content" on a COMPUTER? What are you some kinda grandpa? Why aren't you consuming content from your phone like everyone else? Or casting it from your phone to your SMART TV! Great way to CONSUME CONTENT!

CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT CONSUME CONTENT

replies(2): >>40140566 #>>40140568 #
7. Aerroon ◴[24 Apr 24 04:24 UTC] No.40140561[source]▶
>The relations between human interests are too esoteric for current ML classifiers to understand.

I would go further and say that it is impossible. Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes.

Imagine that all the videos on the internet would be on one big video website. You would watch car videos, movie trailers, listen to music, and watch porn in one place. Could the algorithm correctly predict when you're in the mood for porn and when you aren't? No, it couldn't.

The website might know what kind of cars, what kind of music, and what kind of porn you like, but it wouldn't be able to tell which of these categories you would currently be interested in.

I think current YouTube (and other recommendation-heavy services) have this problem. Sometimes I want to watch videos about programming, but sometimes I don't. But the algorithm doesn't know that. It can't know that without being able to track me outside of the website.

replies(3): >>40141005 #>>40141819 #>>40192374 #
8. skydhash ◴[24 Apr 24 04:26 UTC] No.40140566{3}[source]▶
Lol, Youtube on Apple TV is great. Mostly because I either need to find something fast or I switch it off because the remote is not conducive to skipping. But the only time I watch Youtube on my computer is for a specific video. The waste of space is horrendous. Same with Twitter (rarely visited), just a 3/4 inches wide column of posts on my 24 inch screen.
9. Aerroon ◴[24 Apr 24 04:26 UTC] No.40140568{3}[source]▶
I'm not consuming the content on my phone, because the user experience of using these services on my phone sucks. Just the app vs website difference with urls is a difference in behavior I hate let alone all the UI differences that make the mobile experience awkward.

I don't know about the TV though.

10. FullstakBlogger ◴[24 Apr 24 05:43 UTC] No.40141005{3}[source]▶
>I would go further and say that it is impossible. Human interests are contextual and change over time, sometimes in the span of minutes.

Theres a general problem in the tech world where people seem to inexplicably disregard the issue of non-reducibility. The point about the algorithm lacking access to necessary external information is good.

A dictionary app obviously can't predict what word I want to look up without simulating my mind-state. A set of probabilistic state transitions is at least a tangible shadow of typical human mind-states who make those transitions.

11. alovelace ◴[24 Apr 24 06:16 UTC] No.40141227[source]▶
It all depends on your use case but a lot of people seem to be in agreement it fell off in the mid to late 10s and the suggestions became noticeably worse.
12. throwaway2037 ◴[24 Apr 24 06:20 UTC] No.40141257[source]▶

    > Or when they didn't show 3 unskippable ads in a 5 minute video.
On desktop Chrome, a modern ad-blocking browser extension will block 100% of YouTube adverts. I haven't watched one, literally, in years. I don't watch YouTube from a mobile phone, but I think the situation is different. (Can anyone else comment about the mobile experience?)
replies(1): >>40141695 #
13. snickerer ◴[24 Apr 24 07:35 UTC] No.40141695{3}[source]▶
On Android devices I use the app PipePipe to avoid the YouTube ad hell. I recommend it.

I also use Firefox for Android, which has Addon support. Ublock Origin works on the phone and disables a a lot of the ad horror.

replies(1): >>40150822 #
14. nox101 ◴[24 Apr 24 08:00 UTC] No.40141819{3}[source]▶
I think there are things they could do and that ML could maybe help?

* They could let me directly enter my interests instead of guessing

* They could classify videos by expertise (tags or ML) and stop recommending beginner videos to someone who expresses an interest in expert videos.

* They could let me opt out of recommending videos I've already watched

* They could separate sites into larger categories and stop recommending things not in that category. For me personally, when I got to youtube.com I don't want music but 30-70% of the recommendations are for music. If the split into 2 categories (videos.youtube.com - no music) and (music.youtube.com - only music) they'd end up recommending far more to me that I'm actually interested in at the time. They could add other broad categories like (gaming.youtube.com, documentaries.youtube.com, science.youtube.com, cooking.youtube.com, ...., as deep as they want). Classifying a video could be ML or creator decided. If you're only allowed one category they would be incentive to not mis-classify. If they need more incentive they could dis-recommend your videos if you mis-classify too many/too often).

* They could let me mark videos as watched and actually track that the same as read/unread email. As it is, if you click "not interested -> already watched" they don't mark the video as visibly watched (the red bar under the video). Further, if you start watching again you lose the red-bar (it gets reset to your current position). I get that tracking where you are in a video is something that's different for email vs video but at the same time (1) if I made it to 90% of the way through then for me at least, that's "watched" - same as "read" for email and I'd like it "archived" (don't recommend this to me again) even if I start watching it again (same as reading an email marked as "read)

replies(1): >>40142586 #
15. rvba ◴[24 Apr 24 08:02 UTC] No.40141829[source]▶
They probably optimize your engagement NOW - with clickbaity videos. So their KPIs show big increases. But in long term you realize that what you watch is garbage and stop watching alltogether.

Someone probably changed the engine that shows videos for you - exactly as with search.

replies(1): >>40149937 #
16. fuzztester ◴[24 Apr 24 10:16 UTC] No.40142586{4}[source]▶
Those are some good suggestions, particularly the first one:

>let me directly enter my interests

replies(1): >>40192451 #
17. pfannkuchen ◴[24 Apr 24 12:59 UTC] No.40143825[source]▶
YouTube seems to treat popular videos as their own interest category and it’s very aggressive about recommending them if you show any interest at all. If you watch even one or two popular videos (like in the millions of views), suddenly the quality of the recommendations drops off a cliff, since it is suggesting things that aren’t relevant to your interest categories, it’s just suggesting popular things.

If I entirely avoid watching any popular videos, the recommendations are quite good and don’t seem to include anything like what you are seeing. If I don’t entirely avoid them, then I do get what you are seeing (among other nonsense).

18. astrange ◴[24 Apr 24 21:30 UTC] No.40149937{3}[source]▶
I have to say, all my YouTube recommendations are good and they're rarely clickbait. If you sign out they're pretty bad though.
19. fuzztester ◴[24 Apr 24 22:49 UTC] No.40150822{4}[source]▶
>PipePipe

It feels a bit funny asking this, since we're talking about Google (i.e. YouTube), but did you mean ;) PipeTube? I know there is a PeerTube too.

replies(1): >>40156732 #
20. snickerer ◴[25 Apr 24 12:35 UTC] No.40156732{5}[source]▶
I don't know PipeTube. I meant PipePipe, which works well for me: https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe
21. immibis ◴[28 Apr 24 21:59 UTC] No.40192374{3}[source]▶
you can click one of the ML-selected categories at the top of your homepage to tell it what you'd like to see today
22. immibis ◴[28 Apr 24 22:12 UTC] No.40192451{5}[source]▶
YouTube has this feature
replies(1): >>40302975 #
23. fuzztester ◴[08 May 24 21:41 UTC] No.40302975{6}[source]▶
Where in the menu is it? I admit I have not checked out YouTube menus or features much.